Issue #005
Who do you actually help?
When I was doing my first round of coach interviews, I asked everyone the same question near the end of our conversation:
"How do you describe what you do?"
Most of them gave me some version of the same answer. "I help people reach their full potential." "I work with professionals who want to level up." "I support people through career transitions and life changes."
All technically true, but also all completely forgettable.
Not because these coaches lacked substance — they were talented, experienced people with real results behind them. But when you say you can help anyone, the person on the other side of that sentence can't figure out if you mean them.
And if they can't figure that out fast, they move on.
WHAT’S ON DECK
The Playbook: Why broad positioning loses the sale before you even get in the room
Real Wins: What happened when you stop hedging and commit to your niche
Your Next Move: A four-question test to pressure-check your niche
Steal This: One-sentence exercise to write your ideal client into focus
Coachstack Connect: Keep your message consistent across every client touchpoint
YOUR MISSING PIECE
We're still in Step 1 of the Coaching Flywheel: Clarify Your Focus. Last week was about finding your Information Advantage, aka the expertise you've been sitting on without fully seeing it. This week is about making a decision with it. Niche clarity is the difference between a message that resonates and one that technically says something without landing anywhere.
THE PLAYBOOK
Why "I Help Everyone" Is the Harder Sell
There's a concept Alex Hormozi writes about in $100M Offers that I keep coming back to when I talk to new coaches about positioning.
He describes what happens when a product or service is undifferentiated—when it's just like the others in the market, competing on nothing more than price or availability. Buyers have no particular reason to choose you. So the conversation defaults to cost. You discount. They shop around. You never win on the terms that actually reflect your value.
The same dynamic plays out in coaching, just more quietly.
When your positioning is broad, you're not competing on expertise. What you ARE competing on is whoever happens to find you first, or whoever your network already trusts. That works for a while. Then it stops working and you can't figure out why, because you're doing everything the same.
Specificity is the exit ramp from that cycle. Not because niching down limits you, but because it gives a specific person a specific reason to believe you're the right person for them. Broad positioning doesn't signal confidence. It signals that you haven't quite decided yet.
And clients feel that, even when they can't name it.
The "Category of One" Problem
There's a useful way to think about this. When your positioning is specific enough, you stop competing in a category and start defining one.
"Career coach" is a category. There are thousands of them.
"I help mid-career professionals land senior leadership roles at companies they'd actually want to work for" is something else. There's someone reading that sentence right now who just thought, that's exactly what I need.
That's the moment your marketing starts working, because the person on the other end can see themselves in what you said. Specificity creates recognition. Recognition creates trust, and trust is what gets you on a discovery call.
The coaches I spoke with who had consistent pipelines weren't necessarily better coaches than the ones who were struggling. They had made a decision about who they were for — and they'd gotten comfortable saying it clearly.
What Broad Positioning Actually Costs You
It's worth being honest about what staying general does to your business beyond just making marketing harder.
When you're not clear on who you serve, your content is vague. When your content is vague, you attract people who aren't quite right for your work. When your calls are with people who aren't quite right, your conversion rate suffers. When your conversion rate suffers, you assume you need more leads. So you create more content and reach out to more people — and the same cycle repeats.
The fix is in specificity upstream. One clear niche statement changes the quality of every lead that comes after it.
THE 4-QUESTION NICHE PRESSURE TEST
Once you have a niche in mind—even a rough one—run it through these four questions before you commit to it:
1. Who has real, urgent pain? Not general dissatisfaction. Actual pain that keeps people up at night and makes them willing to spend money to solve. A coach who works with "people who want to feel more fulfilled" is addressing a preference, or who works with "senior leaders who've been passed over for promotion twice and can't figure out why" is addressing a wound.
2. Who can actually pay you? Passion for a market doesn't override economics. If the people you want to serve don't have disposable income or budget access, the work is twice as hard and the results are half as good. This is about building something that doesn't require you to constantly discount to close.
3. Who can you reach without starting from zero? A niche that lives somewhere you already have credibility, connections, or content is easier to penetrate than one you're entering cold. Your Information Advantage (from last week) is the clearest signal here. Where do you already have a reason to be in the room?
4. Is this market growing? You don't need a trend. But a market in active decline makes everything harder. Serving an audience whose challenges are getting more common is a tailwind. Serving one whose relevance is fading is a headwind you didn't need.
If your niche clears all four, you have something worth committing to. If it fails one, you have a specific problem to solve instead of a vague sense that something's off.
REAL WINS
I spoke with a coach recently who had been practicing for about eight months. She was getting clients. Enough clients to keep going, but not enough to feel like a real business. She described her offer as: "I'm a career coach. I work with professionals who want to make a change."
When I asked who she actually loved working with, she answered immediately: "Mid-career women who've been really successful but feel completely stuck—like they built someone else's career by accident."
That answer took her four seconds. The first answer had taken her eight months.
When she updated her LinkedIn and her website to reflect the second version, she signed two clients in the following three weeks. Neither of them had been in her network. They'd found her through content she'd written, recognized themselves in it, and reached out without her prompting.
Nothing else changed. Not her pricing, process, or her offer structure. Just the specificity of who she said she was for.
TL;DR
Three things worth holding onto from this issue:
Broad positioning doesn't attract more clients, but it does attract less specific ones. The people who are exactly right for your work need to recognize themselves in what you say. That only happens when what you say is specific enough to be recognizable.
The cost of staying general compounds. Vague niche → vague content → wrong leads → low conversion → more volume chasing. Specificity fixes the first problem in the chain.
Your niche doesn't have to be permanent to be useful. It just has to be clear enough that the right person can find you. You'll refine it. But you have to start somewhere concrete.
I was on the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur Podcast w/ Brian Lofrumento last week talking through the full Coaching Flywheel system—including niche clarity, validating your idea before you build anything, and why most coaches struggle with the business side even when the coaching itself is excellent. If this issue resonated and you want to go deeper, it's worth the listen. You can either listen on Spotify or watch on YouTube
STEAL THIS
Try this one sentence exercise.
Write your ideal client in one or two sentences using this structure:
"I help [specific type of person] [do/achieve/navigate a specific thing] [so that a specific outcome becomes possible]."
Don't worry about being polished. We want the raw and honest answer. The one you'd say to someone at a dinner party when they asked what you do and you actually wanted to give them a real answer.
If you write it and think, this feels too narrow—that's usually a sign you're close.
COACHSTACK CONNECT
Once you've committed to a niche, the next challenge is keeping that message consistent everywhere a potential client encounters you — your website, intake forms, email communications, client portal. Coachstack's marketing hub is designed to hold that cohesion in one place so you're not manually maintaining the same message across disconnected tools.
YOUR NEXT MOVE
Run your current niche statement (or the one you've been avoiding writing) through the four-question pressure test above.
Then reply and tell me: Who do you really want to help most?
I read every response. A lot of what shows up in future issues comes directly from what people write back.
—Peter
P.S. Founding Cohort applications are still open. The Signature Build Package gives you a complete, done-for-you coaching business system in 45 days — limited to 3 coaches, and applications close June 1, 2026.